No Childhood Left Behind

Magpie Fantasies in the Age of the Anthropocene

Written November-December 2024

I visit the Goodwill bins a few times a week, and I bring home miniature-scale items for future art projects. I’m not the only one looking for treasure in an endless stream of trash. The place gets busier every month.

For my art-making purposes (miniatures at 1in:5ft scale) this is paydirt - a diverse and large collection of plastic animals and army-members, wooden train track, and marble run infrastructure. Such a haul will not run more than $6 at either of Pittsburgh's Goodwill Bins.

A consequence of mass-manufactured plastic and wood toys is their long physical duration, well beyond one child’s childhood. Regifting, hand-me-downs, church toy swaps, donation, eBay, Facebook Marketplace schemes, and Goodwill resales, each is an opportunity to keep the joy going, to animate again this treasured object, and realize its value.

A consequence of long-duration intellectual property rights is their endless remixing, as no child’s imagination can be fully realized by just one product line. Companies can't move a brand as quickly as a child's mind can.

Childhood toys as used by children themselves function as a complex system - a system made up of a large number of parts that interact in a non-simple way. Barbies party with Care Bears and GI Joes alike. Everyone loves to see a dinosaur, especially the wildly inaccurate kinds. No tea party would turn one down. All dinosaurs are redeemable. Every space alien is invited. The stories we make of our beloved figurines are as large as the well-known myths. Web-Deploy Spiderman and Zeus are brothers in arms. Anansi is reflected in a thousand thousand halloween spider joke rings.

To quote The Reach of the Roach God’s cave generation system, which starts with gathering some action figures and black ribbon, “The bodies of the gods made the world. […] The gods fucked and fought; they danced and they died. ARRANGE YOUR LARGE FIGURES AND MEDIUM FIGURES in poses of death and sorrow. EACH SHOULD TOUCH ONE OTHER FIGURE; more is better.” (Pg 275)

Reach of the Roach God (2023) provides its readers with a unique way to generate the map of the cave-and-river system that characterizes the Roach God's domain. Note especially the directions for locating major locations, eg: 2: Head of your noblest-looking figure. Here is UDARAVA'S STAIR, under SPIDER MOUNTAIN TEMPLE.

My career has been in rescuing physical material from the waste stream, from redistributing donated food at the Food Bank to shipping surplus medical supplies internationally, to my art practice, which involves biweekly visits to the local pay-by-the-pound Goodwill outlets. Goodwill, for those outside the United States, is a private charity which raises funds by reselling donated physical goods, and provides a range of services to disabled folks in those same communities. These services include sheltered employment and community participation support for folks with disabilities. Some of their clients are actually employed on-site at the distribution centers, working as a material handling team moving the big blue bins on and off the 'sales floor'.

We gotta talk about the bins. Lakes of stuff. An endless river of random material goods. Like all large material distribution systems, when Goodwill has logistical hiccups, they are big hiccups, tractor-trailer filling hiccups. Incoming donations in one region rarely match outgoing item-sales in that region. Goodwill’s retail stores can only hold so much inventory, and can be overwhelmed by their generous neighbors. So they have distribution centers, and, in Pittsburgh and a few other cities, distribution centers with direct pay-by-the-pound outlets.

The Heidelberg Distribution Center.

These are wild spaces - large warehouse rooms with buzzing halogen lights or super-bright LED strips where fluorescents once were. The floor space is taken up with dozens of blue tables made distinct by their deep plastic walls - “The Bins”, as they are called by all regulars. These bins are filled a little higher than the walls with clothing or 'everything else'. Usually the room is split down the middle, with four or five rows of clothing bins on one side and rows of “stuff” on the other.

I patrol the ‘stuff’ side, and I’ve found an art gallery’s worth of treasures over steady years of humble visits. The bins are rotated in and out over the day. On a busy day, they'll change a row out every half hour. Some regulars stay from when the place opens to when it closes, keeping multiple carts of accumulating finds. They are the first to examine each row of bins as it comes in, swarming as quickly as they can. There's value to be recaptured amid these things which other humans passed along.

The donations come from many places in Goodwill’s logistics process. Some of it is excess local donations, unsorted beyond a cursory glance as it is transferred from cardboard-gaylord-on-a-pallet to the blue tables. Some of it comes from the local area - donations dropped off at the distribution center. Some of it is the unsold leftovers that aren’t moving through Goodwill’s retail stores, no matter how low the items get repriced. Some of the material is unfathomable and strange, as if capitalism's veins had opened up and spilled raw product over everything. We’re back to the strange caves where the god’s bodies rotted out - are these Goodwill Outlets one of the vital organs of excretion in the body of material capitalism? (Yes.)

The North Versailles location. (Pronounced, in case you don’t know, as Ver-Sails, like ship sails)

At the two Pittsburgh Bins (the smaller venue in Heidelberg, and the larger, busier one in North Versailles ), I’ve seen milk crates from as far away as Troy, NY. Their resale is a crime, much less their possession, but they are also hundreds of miles from the jurisdiction that would care. They are available at the same price as suitcases, storage bins, gym weights, and bowling balls - $1.79 each. I have a few at home, stored in IKEA Kallax shelving (built to the same specification to encourage crime, one presumes).

Bullet, the companion of one of the regulars here in Pittsburgh. Bullet is the main occupant of the cart - I think the pup’s companion rarely buys anything, but is always browsing in the bright indoors.

I would estimate that each distribution center has a hundred regulars who are there as their primary economic activity. Most are resellers. They look for things to sell on Facebook Marketplace and other services, which are much cheaper at their by-the-pound price than what they will fetch online. Some folks are there looking for usable household goods, though it's quite a crapshoot picking up a stranger's cutting board. Some regulars are artists like me looking for strange collage material. And some are just there to socialize and stay warm. 

Shopping carts of pickings staged over the course of hours of gathering. A four hour gathering shift might see 150 bins of clothing pass by.

I interviewed one fellow regular who shops on the clothing side of things. She will purchase an entire shopping cart of clothes - $180 is 100lbs of clothing pieces - on a Monday. They aren't for her - they're just clean, salable, and have their labels intact. She'll spend Tuesday photographing labels, finding original manufacturing statistics and prices, and composing Facebook Marketplace listings for the items. She doesn't need to list all of them, and only a fraction of the listings need to sell, if they are selling for a percentage of original retail price. If she can sell ten items for $20 profit each, the other 90% of inventory is all profit. As the items sell, she dropships them to the buyers in flat-rate soft mailers, since it is all used fabric anyway, so costs are very low. Anything she doesn't sell or doesn't list, she donates back to the same Goodwill she bought them all from - water back to the well. A new week brings a fresh inventory to list. And the donation stream is endless.

The pricing structure circa September 2024, as well as a regular's collection of found things, not yet rung up. Look at that illicit milk crate resale! The culprits/customers are looking for more!

There are ground rules to sorting through an endless stream of donated material. You must know, and accept, that you keep kin with vultures and fungi. You are digging through offal searching for gold, and you have to love that for yourself. The impurity of your medium does not make you impure. No, this wading through muck is in fact secret nobility! You keep these things from the true ashbin of history. You wring value out of that which others could not.

You can’t care about germs, or the lingering spirits of the dead. You have to imagine that most of the material here is just toys, held by folks who were at a time peripheral to a child they loved. An aunt’s cache of dinosaurs for a niece now in her twenties, perhaps. A grandparent’s collection of toys for the many visiting grand-babies who have come through. You must approach this material judiciously, sure, avoiding anything with a smell, as well as the sheen of spilled liquids. Children’s bubble-making liquid is a silent destroyer, and very common. Watch out too for water-based paints. Some folks wear masks and gloves when they sort through the bins, while others prefer or believe in a robust immune system and cautious hands and the grace of God. 

But to enjoy the place, one must look beyond such precautions and fears, and look at the hope and value these donations represent. Each was given with at least a thought towards re-use, any kind of re-use, rather than the rubbish heap. Yes, there are more uncleaned vacuums than you would appreciate. Ignore them. There are carefully packed collections, right next to them, made ready for the next person or family to enjoy. Plastic food sorted into ziplock bags, or packs of cards rubber banded to ensure the deck stays together and complete.

A nativity scene stripped of most of its parts, floating on a sea of office supplies and space-saving shelves for out of date offices and empty cabinets;

You can see the churn of consumer capitalism at the Bins, in the incomplete sets of obsolete toy train tracks (a new track gauge every time the Thomas the Tank Engine license moves to a different manufacturer, for example). The many companies selling plastic African megafauna (“Safari Animals” is the industry term) reduce to a variety of paint schemes atop a smaller number of injection moldings. There are networks of factories across Asia making a steady stream of variations and repackagings, subsets from a limited superset. And one can't overlook the volume of material moving through. It doesn't end. Americans are constantly buying things, and as their life circumstances change, constantly shedding things. All the fads of the 90s and 2000s can be rehashed at the Goodwill Bins twenty years on, as the material echo of that fad hits the donation centers.

One learns from this  time-delayed river of donations that books have lifespans. Science books become so inaccurate or outdated as to be offensive in decades, not centuries. When collaging from Time Life Geography and Biology books I have to excise an awful lot of ‘oriental’ as a generic descriptor of realm, animal species, culture, etc.   

Transforming this trash into treasure, and showing others a path to do the same, is the foundation of my artistic practice. A better future can be built from our strange present. It won’t get built out of anything else, in fact, if that better future is to be built at all.

A Triangle Horse, one of many tangramata. These plastic-and-metal constructs were left behind by ancient humans. These ones, the triangle horses, are huge, and will definitely trample you to death.

Nature’s decomposers are recomposers too. Life from the loam. This excess of unwanted variety is something like the nutrients released from a glacier’s runoff onto an empty landscape. After filtering and sorting and processing, new ideas can grow and develop from the sintered parts of the already-used.

I’ve been compiling the infrastructure decomposition and recomposition, too. The aforementioned illicit milk crates and the shelves to hold them. I scored a set of laboratory slide=holding drawers. They now hold a sorted Animalia.

From Amphibians to Dinosaurs, this set of slide draws has something for everybody.

This part of the process, the sorting, warehousing, composing, and redistribution of material, is my wheelhouse. To my eyes, my studio is a small industrial district, with a space for incoming material, banks of warehouse shelves, two workbench desks, a painting and glueing station, and three dozen tea trays of work-in-process.

There are the slide drawers of animals, but I also have boxes and milk crates, labeled and sorted. The categories are self-composing. As I notice a trend in the small objects which, over time, catch my eye, they end up in their own labeled bin, or more than one. Here is a selection of categories into which I sort:

• Marble Runs

• Cranes

• Dinosaurs (Medium)

• Fake Flowers (Regular Size)

• Miniature Plants

• Chessmen, Army Men, Pawns

• Ocean Life & Bugs

• Kitch (Minecraft etc)

• Wooden Toys

• Smol Architecture

• Bones and Halloween

• Gears & Jewelry

You can see the outlines of American (and, increasingly Global) childhood in these large categories. I’m not even including figurative models like cars, airplanes, and branded characters. These other plastic items are the generic reflections of our own Earth.

The small animals are the polar ends of a U-shaped curve - many are the familiar domestic animals of western farm life, many are the exotic megafauna of Africa, Asia, and the Arctic, some are the planet’s lizard kings, and almost none are the wide diversity of actual life: birds, beetles, worms, fungi, and the endless green of the plant kingdom.

Another room holds my finished pieces, sorted by Newtopia District.

I’ve spent long months incorporating the most universal childhood toys into Newtopia’s deep fictional history, so that these elements make up the built environment (and ruins) of the Newtopian world.

That world’s human civilizations, for example, relied on robotic constructs called Tangramata. One of those automata is pictured above - the terrible Triangle Horse. These geometric servitors use tangram shapes as their building blocks. The houses and skyscrapers of those civilizations were built to similar cultural preferences.

In this way, tangram toy pieces of many scales can contribute to the planetoid’s realization. That spirit carries over to plastic train tracks, geometric construction sets (PlusPlus, Knex, Lego, and others), math toys like Cuisenaire rods and magnetic shape tiles, on and on.

This isn’t about nostalgia. The material of childhood gets manufactured year after year, for new sets of children. As long as Americans buy toys they’ll donate excess toys, or worse, throw them straight away. This is is a rescue mission, to resurrect and reuse long-lasting items which we have made for short-term childhoods. If these plastic and wood items don’t end up as part of our material culture now, they’ll end up in the planet-destroying trash-yards which will characterize our species for future alien archeologists who stumble on our denuded world.

Chiaroscuro Days ||| Weeks 1-6, 2024 ||| Pittsburgh, Penna

First published by email, February 14 2024

Chiaroscuro Days ||| Weeks 1-6, 2024 ||| Pittsburgh, Penna

Black-and-white scenes with little hints of brown are the classic look of Pittsburgh in Snow. Part of the effect is the thin, washed out light that filters through the heavy cloud layer, muting what colors remain.

They call winter the "thin part of the year". It gets dreamy and mistlike in here, a kind of hibernation-hangover that affects humanity. Ancient calendars used to peter out in December and start again many dozens of days later, at a reasonable, stable daylight cycle. Marking 'January 1' was an annual guessing game, and a vital one, as the ensuing lunar calendar set the tempo for the human activity surrounding the upcoming growing season. The Roman addition of July and August to mid-summer does more than praise two emperors- the two months push the once-floating January 1 all the way back to the fixed day-after-December 31, eliminating the 'timeless' winter of rest and imposing the imperial (solar) math of the stars.

In medieval Europe, winter engendered a 'second sleep', with many extant letters referencing the late hour at which they were written - two candles of domesticity in the deep night, between two distinct sleep cycles. We all adapt to winter in our own ways. The challenge is not 'how to stay productive' so much as 'how to get through these dark, short, cold days.' Survival is paramount.

I leaned on my positive habits through January and early February. I drew and wrote, and I took long walks on the Montour Trail, a 40-something mile trail that rings Pittsburgh on former rail rights-of-way. The post-industrial landscape is strange, inspiring, and a little bit haunted. In February, I'm looking forward to seeing my friend Fungi Flows bring the world record for freestyle rapping to Pittsburgh - he's going to rap for more than 2 days straight.

Curb Divit ||| Bumper Sticker

Pittsburgh is called the Iron City, and one of the unique markers of the place is a tendency for the road edges (whether sidewalk, loading dock, building edge, or retaining wall) to be reinforced against damage by heavy traffic - trucks and big machines. One peculiarity is the use of metal angle-irons to reinforce curbs.

An example of an iron curb. Note the jagged edges where the metal has failed, just left of the telephone pole.

During one of the snowy evenings in January, one of these curbs took some chunks from my passenger-side front tire. Snowy narrow roads at night. The city demands sacrifice. What surprised me was that the tire was not blown out. It held air for 10-15 hours at a time after losing all this external material. That said, I stopped driving immediately, and had a totally new tire installed the next day.

My old tire, now replaced. The larger divit could have a US Quarter placed comfortably inside the excavated area.

It was hard for me to really feel regretful or sad about this accidental damage. I love how overengineered my city can be. And as soon as it happened, I reminded myself of a particular mantra, from my own neighborhood. There's a car that parks at the coffee shop I visit weekly, over in Avalon PA. It brings sage advice, which were the first words that came to my mind when I got too close to this one curb and it bit my tire so bad. Don't worry, Connor ...

✨ Hot Girls Hit Curbs ✨

Refrigerator Roundup

I am a man of habit and cyclical work. I try each day in January to make some fun art, really lightweight and joyous work, as part of #funaday , an annual month-long challenge to do just that. 

Over 2023, I found a few strange collections of refrigerator magnets in my art supply gathering. For Fun-a-Day, each day I mashed business words and dinosaurs and construction magnets into clever scenarios & one panel jokes. I posted a few of these to my instagram, but here's the full set.

My favorite one is "Open Product Economy" because I like the idea of a space dinosaur underbidding SpaceX. "Business Problem" was the most-reacted-to of the ones I shared on my instagram.

Montour Trail Progress

The Greer Tunnel, a 'wet tunnel' characterized by groundwater leaking in from the ceiling. The entire tunnel floor is a deep bed of gravel for continuous drainage. When trains ran through here (through the 1980s), a team would have to walk ahead with sledgehammers to knock the ice columns out of the right-of-way.

I started walking the Montour Trail in July of 2022. I should finish out my walk by this coming July, if not sooner.
Here's what I wrote back then, right when I was in the middle of buying the house I live in now.

During July and August, to fill these stressful times of forced inaction, I made it a mission to walk the suburban Montour Trail system, a 46 mile belt of rails-to-trails walking paths which circle the city's core. I started at the north-most end, in Coraopolis, PA, and have walked the path in sections, down to the Enlow Tunnel outside Imperial PA - the first seven miles. These were solo walks, from a parking lot out and then back. If I continue in that style (rather than, say, walk one-way and take a ride-share back to my car), and explore some of the side paths, this will prove to be a hundred mile project. I'm excited to see how the seasons turn.

I'm more than half-way along the trail, walking through Trail Miles 30 and 31 in my most recent walk. I've been logging the plants and animals I've seen along the way over on iNaturalist. You can see the trail in the traces of my logged data, on the left and bottom portions of this map.

The trail continues all the way to Clairton, PA - I have 16 more miles to go, traveling east along creeks and under highways. It's a remarkable project, the result of decades of township by township project-work, innumerable Eagle Scout projects for systemic trail improvement, and a network of collaborators. The trail crosses out of Allegheny County into Washington County. It runs through many former industrial sites, from factories to coal mines. This last week, I walked over two shuttered mines, Montour #4 and #11, both now flooded underground lakes not economical enough to pump out and continue to mine.

Upcoming Events: Two+ Days of Freestyle

Show Poster by M. Pallas Studios .

Pittsburgh rapper and friend Fungi Flows has been working his way up to world-record durations of spontaneous freestyle rap. He began his training last year, working up from 6 hours to 12, to 24 hours, to 36! Now he's going for more than two days of continuous rapping, live and on livestream, using topics from every place he can find them.

He'll be doing this attempt in a bit more than a week hence, here in Pittsburgh at Codename Creators Next Door, 3pm Feb 23 (Friday) to 5pm Feb 25 (Sunday). Try putting that in your calendar app! There will be livestreams on youtube, instagram, and anywhere else fungiflows comes up in search.

Fungi has been making a name for himself in the city for a few years now, rapping outside public events, as a guest speaker and musician, and at festivals across the country. He is a gentle, wonderful man, who raps about the positive benefits of fungi, from food to mental transformation to physical medicine to environmental regulator to planetary mind-thread-mass. He seeks world peace, and uses the spoken word to bring people together. You can listen to the 36-hour Freestyle he did last month here on youtube.

If you have some funds to spare, please consider donating to the Fungi cause, to defray the costs of the space, the crew keeping the cameras going and the folks keeping Fungi fed and hydrated. This kind of spectacle is cheaper than you might imagine, but it's definitely four digits and not three. Most of the donations are in the $20-50 range so far - support adds up fast when the community comes out like that.

Right now, the Guiness World Record for durrational rap is held by a rapper in Japan, whose flows were not entirely freestyle - he used long segments of pre-written verses. Fungi is going to crush that record and do it with authentically off-the-dome lyrics for the whole two day experience. Help him bring the title home to the states.

I'll be attending for sure, both digitally and in person, though I am but a human, not a rap-mushroom, and will dip out sometimes. Think about it - Fungi will be there, rapping, that whole time. You eat, you sleep, you have a whole weekend of errands and events, he keeps it down for the culture.

I'll see yinz soon,

Connor Sites-Bowen

www.connorsb.com

A Good Year - Week 1, 2024 Pittsburgh, Penna.

Published January 5 2024

(The title here refers to the delightful Russell Crowe vehicle.)

[The Ohio Connecting Railroad Bridge brings double-stacked container trains from the Mon Line from the Ohio River’s southern shore across to the Norfolk Southern Main Line on the northern shore, where it exits the city towards Ohio and points West.]

Happy New Year! 2024! Two dozens past Millennium, and we are still out here, surviving towards the future world. Lady Chatterly’s Lover is in the public domain, among thousands of other 1928 works.

The back half of 2023 was a full & steady season in my life. Here’s a summary. 

First Draft Complete!

[Megadimetrodons out on courtship display in B24 The Groundswell Flood Forest.]

I took a hiatus from the Dispatches to focus on writing A Field Guide to Newtopia, the book project I’ve been working on since 2019. The scope of work has expanded since then too, to nearly 1400 milestones (64 with a few variations). I’m over the hump - the project is more finished than unfinished. The writing should be complete by the end of this month. My goal for 2024 is to see the book into print production. The task will require an enormous amount of help - a good role playing game book is the product of many eyes and many editors. 

It was a long year of writing, drawing, brainstorming, and puzzling out the dynamics of the book's simulation-like method of revealing overland travel situations. Here at the end of the year, each of the 36 hexes is distinct, well-described, and evokes feelings of dynamic, living landscapes, on Earth or well beyond it. A quote from Robert Macfarlane : “Landscapes that are generically apprehended and generically described are at risk of abuse.” My goal for each one of Newtopia's 36 chapters has always been to overcome the hard truth of that advice.

I seek through text and imagery a world which must be saved, because, in truth, our own world needs to be regarded with as much interest if we are to survive in it.

[Early brainstorming notes from the social history of 4-5 The Parklands, a white-walled cloister of skeleton-tended garden cities.]

I've done a lot of brainstorming-about-world-histories in the last year. A tool which helped in the recent months is the community-story RPG called Grasping Nettles, written by Adam Bell and illustrated by Sashah Li, both here in Pittsburgh, PA. Grasping Nettles provides a neat move-around-a-wheel system to bring the different factions of a society through cycles of action, reaction, change and change again. It is designed to be played as a group activity, but I found it greatly useful as a one-person brainstorming tool.

If you need a primer on role playing games as a hobby and a publishing industry, your best bet is the exhaustive, illuminative, and humorously insightful Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, by writer Stu Horvath. This archive and coffee table tome provides rare photographs and insightful paragraphs about role playing games published from their inception in the 1970s through to the 2020s (today). Mr. Horvath runs a podcast and instagram called Vintage RPG, and has gained an audience with cleareyed writing about the very odd things that grab the childhood imagination. The book is autobiographical without being cloying. It has opinions, but it doesn’t dwell on negative ones. For the uninitiated, it may provide insight into these nerds with these dice and these little guys on battle grid bases.

A Visit to A City

The Field Guide describes 36 ecological zones in a fantastic landscape long after our own civilization has passed by. I had the opportunity this last year to see a piece of art intended to be seen by such future civilizations - the famous and infamous piece of land art outside Las Vegas, Nevada called City.

Briefly, the work is an enormous multi-square-mile plaza of suburban curbs, gravel pitches, real and artificial rockfalls, gentle rises too perfect to be natural, and anti-rill gravel maintenance after every rainfall event. It is monumental in scale and execution. 

Only six people are allowed on site at a time, and given three hours alone to walk the vast space. Heat and altitude limit visits to just one pre-dawn group per business day - around 1200 visitors per year.  The benefactor-millionaire who lives next door to the artwork typically flies in, using the extra-wide driveway as a landing strip for his private plane. 

City is in the middle of nowhere - an hour and a half of driving beyond Alamo, NV, itself two hours outside of Las Vegas. Alamo is not more than a few signed intersections wide. At 5am, it is eerie - the only lit area in a vast ocean of empty, shadowy air. At 11am, when one returns from City, it does possess a great bastion of civilization called Sinclair Oil, a gas station of modern delights, guarded by a giant plastic sauropod.

In addition to its other qualities, City is supposed to be kept analog only: no photos could capture it, so they ask for no photos ever. To whit:

The sculpture City is a registered work, protected by federal copyright law. Triple Aught Foundation has a strict copyright enforcement policy regarding unauthorized photographing or filming of the work. No unauthorized reproductions, public display or distribution of copies of the work, in whole or in part are permitted.

I’d appreciate this argument for the authentic experience and the authentic experience only, if the space or others like it were available to a lot more people than 1200 people per year. But like other sites designed to be sacred, and ancient, and contemplative, and remote, it will not be available to almost all of humanity. There’s no ‘authentic experience’ to miss out on for anyone beyond the 1200. We’re not at a societal place where we’d pay $40 million each in tax dollars for 100 more Cities, installed in every state and territory (a mere two days of this year’s Department of Defence budget). We won’t replicate this experience for others, not as a group.

And so I think it’s the moral duty of each visitor to City to go ahead and sneak some documentation out, as an individual action of experience-sharing, regardless of the wishes of the artist or the foundation elected to manage the place. If the place truly has ineffable, unphotographable qualities, what harm does photography do to it? If the feelings it elicits are not feelings one could prepare for, what documentation is going to spoil their elicitation on-site? To keep this hard-to-access piece from seeing reproduction is the worst kind of elitism.

Praxis: Miniature Titans and Newtopia Residents

[Dianisia, Artillery Sovereign, Spotted Snakefolk Ranger, patrolling the few free-flowing highlands of Newtopia region 15 Northwest Glacier.]

Artmaking is not linear. In negative cases, this manifests as messy, obscure efforts across many mediums. When multidisciplinary practice fires on all cylinders, work in one medium provides clarity to work in other media. Painting small miniatures helps me solve problems of physical description. Finding and composing little landscapes of plastic lets me work through ideas of fantastic ecology and deep fictive history. From the writing and the miniatures, drawings for the book emerge naturally and swiftly. These things flow into each other, accelerating the work towards completion.

[Polaris, one of the Great Ghost Bears of 41 The Nail. Their civilization of enormous philosophical sorcerers was forcefully ended by a powerful magical event - their hexagonal temple-city was isolated from the surrounding geology and lifted violently into the sky, crushing the bearmonks against the Ceiling of the World. Their shades still appear on starlit nights, and their calming mantras blink from distant suns.]

I’ve put together about a hundred miniatures related to Newtopia, covering all thirty six hexes. I will continue to create them, filling in the details of the world as well as pursuing my own fancy. As the book moves towards print, these physical prototypes will see even more use, as staging and blocking for the line art inside the book. I’ve used them in playtesting, as combatants on a square battle grid. Eventually, I will have them available for sale at local art markets and on my website.

2024 is a golden age for the hobby of making small crafts. Innovative acrylic paints are coming out all the time. There are many styles of high quality 3D printer available to the consumer, and more .stl files online every hour. We swim in a sea of little plastic guys. And we live an an age that revels in spectacle - clear photographs and engaging video of brightly colored, sparkly friends. Newtopia seeks to provide. You can follow my crafting more closely on instagram, where I am at pittsburghpapercraft.

[A goddess of embodiment and reality, weighed down by the chains of material being.]

Ezell

[Musicians Rachel Meirs and Cory Shenk provide back porch tunes to an outdoor community meal after the performance.]

The play I exhorted you to in my last missive, Ezell, Ballad of a Land Man, was a hit - a series of excellent community-raising nights (and one Sunday matinee) in late September & early October. A cast from across Appalachia convened to tell stories of land and water right at the edge of our own Allegheny River.

I assisted as front-of-house person and general photographer, welcoming neighbors to the space, dispensing beverages, and helping prepare the communal dinner space for after the play. 

[Bob Martin as Ezell Parsons, expressing generations of community in this one-man show.]

The sound of Appalachia is a post-industrial sound. The land is a land with strewn metal junk turned up from the earth and then thrown away by prior generations or present litterbugs. Old cans, strange hardware, chain and rebar and angle irons, these things are some of the physical ‘rust’ of the Rust Belt. Ezell made brilliant use of these found and re-found objects, creating droning noises from washers, meditative snare-sounds from strings of cans and chains. The performance was pierced by the occasional Allegheny Valley noise: the Norfolk Southern main line runs just across the river; the venue shares an access road with a metal recycling facility, whose crushing machines produce characteristic intonations.

[Carrie Brunk as Eliza, daughter of Ezell, with Cory Shenk hipdeep in the river, behind.]

And in quiet moments, the play fell into harmony with the river and its sounds. The wind, the birds, the gentle lapping of passing wakes against the meager shore. And that’s Appalachia, too: a temperate rainforest yearning towards abundance and diversity. An archipelago of mountain environments, each host to strange and special plants and salamanders. The bones of our continent’s greatest mountains, rivals to the Himalayas and source of the nutrient-laden soils of the continent’s agricultural heartland, are just a few dozen miles away. 

The play’s music makes this link direct: Cory calls out some of the haunting lyrics of ‘Black Water’ by Jean Ritchie:

Then they tore down my mountain and covered my corn

Now the grave on the hillside's a mile deeper down

And the man stands a talking with his hat in his hand

While the poison black waters rise over my land

Sad scenes of destruction on every hand

Black waters, black waters, run down through my land

The Allegheny and the Monongahela drain the Allegheny Front in Pennsylvania and the West Virgininian ranges as far south as Cheat Mountain. These rivers still transmit vital resources downstream and up, connecting remote townships to global markets, with dredging provided as a federal service. The endless bounty of running water coming down from these hills, that is the sound that will carry us through most any calamity, and something we must safeguard for the future.

The work continues. Carrie and Bob, who are, together, Clear Creek Creative, can be found at clearcreekcreative.net. 

Best Winter Wishes

[Tuesday Cat in her winter scarf. What an excellent muse, what a trusty Studio Cat!]

From this studio and house up on Observatory Hill, I wish you all warmth and wellness in these colder, darker months. I hope to write to you again soon.

I’d love to hear from you all! Comment below and let me know how your life is going!

Warm regards from Pittsburgh,
Connor

Continental Drift 2023

February && March 2023 ||| Pgh >> SF Bay >> Pgh

I love a road trip, and every other year for the past four years (2019, 2021, and 2023), I’ve taken a cross-continent voyage, at various paces. I’ve visited almost every state, three round trips in. This adventure was inspirational, profound, and filled me with visions for my art. I met some wonderful and wild Americans, of course. We’re all over the place now.

Westbound

‘Treat Yourself to the Best’ - Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco Barn-side Advertisement, McDermott, Ohio

I spent almost a week in and around Ohio, in the part of the Ohio River Valley where they ancient Teays River flowed far north of the Ohio River’s present channel (before the Canadian Shield rose and tilted its watershed northward). This intersection of ancient river channels was something like a highway interchange for the first peoples of the Americas.

There are megastructure mound sites all over the area, enormous ceremonial and cultural sites which many peoples would use, as modern pilgrims would follow the Camino de Santiago, or nations might perform state funerals for revered leaders.

I visited Mound City & the Serpent Mound. Both sites are more than a thousand years old - Mound City’s use and growth-in-construction eclipsed the Roman Empire (and was contemporaneous). The very early Smithsonian publication Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley provides detailed surveys of hundreds of sites with as storied a history as these two, most of which were dismantled by white settlers and used for roadbeds, fieldstone foundations, and other ‘land improvements’.

I took a fair amount of video at both sites, which I’ll edit together for Youtube. (If this text is still here, I haven’t created the youtube video yet. When I do, I’ll replace this with a link or an embedded video.)

The Lafe Taylor house, Rarden, OH

There are other monuments in this set of wide, old valleys. Population ~160, the town of Rarden Ohio also hosts this 22-room Victorian mansion-house. It was built for a local stone magnate, Lafe Taylor. He took a lumber fortune and rolled it into the Taylor Stone Company, a sandstone mine. The area is called Scioto County, a native word related to deer and deer hunting. On a followup trip to Columbus, OH, I absolutely want to stop and meet the Scioto Lounge Deer Sculptures.

As you reach Southern Ohio, and close in on the borders with Kentucky and West Virginia, you reach the hilly edges of Appalachia. Here, roads and highways cut through limestone, shale, and sandstone laid down 400+ million years ago.

Williamson, WV, on the Tug Fork River, has my favorite Chamber of Commerce building of any place- the Coal House.
This stone block building is made out of a special stone: coal, cut from the heart of the vein. There was an interior fire which took the original wallpaper, but the building’s structure never lit - quarried & still massive (uncrushed) coal only ignites at very high temperatures.

Interior of an iron puddling furnace, looking up. This space would have been loaded with alternating layers of iron ore and coal, and fired for days, until metallic iron seeped out.

The Cumberland Gap Trail runs a few miles from the Kentucky-Tennessee-Virginia tripoint. This ancient low-point in the Cumberland Mountains is the gentlest pass for a hundred miles in either direction, and has been used for thousands of years. During white settlement, they built this iron puddling furnace by the fresh creeks flowing down from the ridgeline on the southern (Virginia) side. The northern side (Kentucky) has favorable geography because there is a meteor-created valley there, the Middlesboro Crater.

I got to meet these beautiful cows (and one handsome bull) at a friend’s farm in Tennessee. The hill you can see on the other side of the creek-valley has been in his family for four generations now.

These were some deeply spiritual cows. They just wanted to hang out and be calm. I felt at home on this Tennessee earth, grounded in a very literal sense, as if the grass and the cows and I had neural connections down into the earth, like we were all players in the same dance, reading from the same script.

It was a wonderful spiritual tuneup to hang out just across the electric fence from these ungulates, just sitting crosslegged and singing to them. They are part of an agrarian tradition which predates our current, broken food system.

On Rt 411, in far Eastern Tennessee, you can find Benton’s Smokey Mountain Country Hams, a buildings which smells of smoke and sugar, and is the home of expertly prepared meat from big southern hogs. I picked up a few center cuts and a rasher of bacon, which were distributed out again across the rest of the trip. I got a t-shirt, which still retains the smoke-and-sugar smell of the building, even after many washes. Amazing ham. Benton’s ships nationwide, by the way.

GAR! Gar gar gar!
As I crossed the south, I came through Monroe, Louisiana, and the Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge. While walking the trails, I saw vultures circling, taking off and landing from a set of trees on the trail ahead. Among other bones scattered across the trail, this circular gar was the most photogenic. Look at those teeth!

The wildlife really changes as you move across the continent. This front desk scorpion was cousin to many real sting-friends in Canton, TX.

These deer are new to the continent. To my eyes, they seemed like small, fat white tail deer fauns, but this is a herd of adults of a totally different species. They are chital, or axis deer, native to the Indian subcontinent. They were introduced in Texas in 1932 as a hunting animal, though they’ve become wild self-sustaining populations since that controlled introduction. These ones are chewing up the lawn at the Lynden B Johnson State Park & Historic Site.

I’ve never been to another place like south-west Texas. The land is verdant and also arid: there are plants here that are totally unique to the region, evolving innumerable clever strategies to preserve water, minimize sun damage, survive herbivory. Species like this opuntia thrive in hot, dry, mountainous land, forming a waist-high forest of sharp and waxy flora.

My aunt Molly, my mother’s younger sister, is a volunteer campground ranger for the National Park Service, currently stationed down in Big Bend National Park, along the Texas-Mexico border.

She’s having an incredible time, and was also very happy for a visit from her nephew.

Big Bend is one of the few truly empty places left in the country, and it will remain that way. Camping is reservation only, and limited to just five or six sites across thousands of acres of cacti, thorn-scrub, stonecrops, roadrunners, and more.

February in the Rio Grande valley is quite cool. The sun shines bright through the thin, dry skies, but the chill of night takes a few hours to blow away. I really love this see-you-around photo with my aunt: we are both very content and in-our-element.

Driving through Arizona and New Mexico towards Las Vegas, where I was visiting a friend, I saw many more deserts, each one a different geology, and host to wildly different plants. Sotols, Yuccas, Century Plants, Agaves, cholla trees, hedgehog cacti, saguaro, and more. The nine-foot-tall plant above is an ocotillo, a plant which straddles the US-Mexico border, growing tiny leaves close to their needle-filled trunks, and flowering with beautiful red buds in spring, for bees to feed at and pollinate.

San Francisco Bay Area

Stanford University’s Tower, with snow on the mountains west of the San Francisco Bay.

Visiting the San Francisco Bay area is always a surreal homecoming. The strange weather events of March 2023 amped that feeling up. Since 1993, when my family moved to California, I’ve seen (or got a phone call describing) snow just once or twice in the Bay Area. On this trip, I saw snow accumulation on Skyline Blvd, a ridgeline road at just 1000-2000ft above sea level, and only a few miles from the sea. Typically, this arrangement gives it an extremely stable and mild buffer of warm, moist sea air (part of the attraction of living in the Bay Area), but even this coastal arrangement could not keep the snow away. Wild!

Dry Gardens are of great interest in California, where many communities must adjust to strict restrictions on irrigation and garden-watering. These Mexican succulents, Sedum adolphi, are known as the Coppertone Stonecrop. My mom planted them among many small and medium rocks, as well as two enormous boulders turned to their maximum verticality. The effect is as you see here - a kind of calligraphic landscape in miniature: Sedum trees form a foreground forest, with abstracted, hilly landforms rising behind.

Lightwell at the Westview-Valley Fair mall complex.

“California Dreaming” is a real built phenomenon: The mild climate has provided for a century of abstract, light-filled buildings, as a strong cultural preference. Combined with modern capitalism, there is a strong architectural urge towards total abstraction, to the point of empty, backrooms-like dream spaces.

The pandemic has emptied these spaces out to their minimum viability, which really adds to the ‘you’ve left reality and entered a void’ feeling. The food court had dozens of folks across its cavernous, tabled atrium, so it wasn’t all empty. But once you left that central food zone, you tended to have the whole hall to yourself unless you ducked into one of the open stores (about half of the available retail bays), where at most two people were working.

Self-Portrait at the original Round Table Pizza location, in my childhood town, Menlo Park, CA.

Round Table Pizza is a Menlo Park institution. This is King Arthur and his Knights themed pizza, and has maintained that theme from 1959 to the present. The chain has grown to 400+ stores.

My earliest video game memories come from Menlo Park’s second Round Table location, which had arcade cabinets for Mortal Kombat, Raiden II, and 1943, and, eventually, Metal Slug II.

I’d play these quarter games while we waited for take-out pizza. I could usually get thru the first level or two of each game. The video games are gone, but the pizza remains, and the pizza is mighty.

My favorite has long been the Maui Zaui, a spicy Hawaiian pizza with onions, tomatoes, ham, pineapple, bacon, and a zesty sauce.

Tuesday is so cute. This little witch-cat has been my friend for almost six months now. She traveled all the way out to California (and back) in the enclosed truck-bed (a little cat condo!) and can be seen here flopped over trying to distract me from journaling.

Oleander, a bitter and poisonous plant. Exposure to the sap can really inflame. It’s a very popular garden plant in California.

This is some very solid sidewalk art. If only stone koi lazed about in all of our cement.

Menlo Park has strict tree-cutting laws, and documentation on almost every tree in town. Homeowners are encouraged to really let big trees keep growing. I used to ride my bicycle under the branches of this mighty oak, on my way to high school. She keeps growing, and has been fortified from traffic. She must be eighty feet tall, and as wide, in addition to an underground root structure just as big.

California has multiple kinds of corvids. In addition to the blue jay (Cyanocitta cristata), they have the rude bois known as Steller’s Jays, Cyanocitta stelleri, whose crests and bulk make them stand out from their eastern cousins.

They love peanuts. My dad has a small wicker basket by the back door to the back porch, and he and the jays have come to an understanding about exactly the right throwing distance.

My folks doing their best American Gothic, the day I headed back East.

The state flower, the California Poppy. Sign of a happy, bounteous visit.

Eastbound

San Luis Reservoir, in Central California, is much more full than it was a few months ago. The enormous rain storms (atmospheric rivers) which have hit California, Arizona, and New Mexico have alleviated a years-long state of drought. The statewide reservoir system, San Luis included, has been refreshed enough that any water restrictions have been lifted for at least the next three years.

Southern California, the desert part, is a wildly different landscape from the coast. This long sunset in the Mojave Desert, somewhere outside of Barstow, CA, really shows off the blue of distance - truly gorgeous gradient effects.

About seventy miles from the Arizona border, I pulled off the highway for a little stretch break, and ended up hiking forty feet up a scree field to photograph this hedgehog cactus. It’s about a foot tall, and there were ten more specimens visible higher up (and on steeper banks). This is another species native to North America. I was about a month early for any kind of flower bloom - beautiful magenta petals.

These are the Bristol Mountains, a complex set of geologies that rise above the alluvium of the Mojave flats. Some of the granite outcrops are pre-Cambrian, pre-fossils, some of the oldest parts of the North American continent. Other parts are geologically recent lava flows, emerging from faults as this land slowly stretches and thins out. (Denver and Salt Lake City and Lake Tahoe are all slowly moving away from each other, and new magma flows in to fill in the widening gaps, usually kicking out silicic volcano-hills).
The strange and varied soils in such mosaics allow for a lot of plant speciation, and intense biodiversity. The botany follows the geology.

An omen-bird of the deep desert, an American Raven.

This is Bill Williams Mountain, whose cloud-hidden summit is in the 9000ft range. It’s in northern Arizona, off Route 40, and does not typically get snow like this in mid-March. On the far side is Flagstaff, Arizona.

An enormous container train on the long straight haul between Flagstaff, AZ and Albuquerque, NM. As you can see from the milemarker (which counts up from the west to the east), the train is near the Arizona-New Mexico border.

The Painted Cliffs outside Lupton, AZ. Oversized Pickup Truck for scale.

This little lady was in some kind of animal communion with Tuesday as each creature was parked in her respective truck bed, and both trucks were parked filling up on gas.

The other driver said that she was doing good, she had just gotten way lost for a few days, outside whatever enclosure her flock is enclosed within.

The former Gallup Refinery, outside of Church Rock, NM, decommissioned August 2020.

A billboard outside Bluewater, NM.

Tiamat, five-headed dragon-queen of Hell, at Duke City Games in Albuquerque. I really love the little human miniature for scale.

Speaking of scale, we’ve built and are building some pretty amazing megaprojects here in 21st century America. This is Salt Fork One, an installation of 112 two-megawatt wind turbines, east of Amarillo, TX.

For scale, note the two-story access stairway at the base of the front right tower. How many rows of turbines can you see receding into the fog?

Loretta’s, an antiques and gift store in Shamrock, TX, truly was a lucky, and bizarre find.

I have a couple photos of this van-with-a-cross-trailer, which are days apart. We were fellow travelers on Rt 40 for states.

Somebody had just too many extra Space Marines, and went ahead and made a gradient wall here at New World Games and Comics, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

I love the green brontosaurus of the Sinclair Oil logo. It’s a dependable, friendly roadside monument, a sort of travel-saint in 25 of our 50 states, mostly in the greater American West. This one was in McLoud, OK. Behind the dinosaur and me, you can see the truck and its bed cap - Ms Tuesday spent the voyage in that back area, with various bedding areas, her cat sand, a cat tower, and a food station (as well as my luggage and travel supplies). She sleeps very well at 80 mph. She also has a lead and harness, so she spent some amount of time in the passenger seat up front with me.

Headed towards the "deep dark hills of Eastern Kentucky” on the Cumberland Parkway. These ridges feel like home territory. It’s just a day or two to Pittsburgh, four or five hundred miles.

Increasingly close to home. This rubber tire gantry is being used as a mobile crane in this highway reconstruction project outside Huntington, WV. My last day of travel.

Enormous greenshield lichen patches on bedrock, Wallback, West Virginia. For scale, my hand-width is around 10in, so the larger colony here was around 5ft tall - as big as a person!

An oft-photographed view because it is an awesome one: Pittsburgh’s downtown skyscrapers as seen from the Fort Pitt Bridge (yellow, left), just as you exit the Fort Pitt Tunnels. It’s a dramatic reveal every time, even two decades into residence.

Lost Creeks of the East End

WEEK 14 OF 2019 ||| PITTSBURGH, PENNA.

[Monongahela Way, which is built atop the culverted Nine Mile Run. Storm water pipes from every neighborhood between Frick Park and the East Hills flow from gutter-side catchment basins down into larger and larger pipes, until they merge into the ever-flowing stream beneath this alleyway, just east of Braddock Avenue.]

I've been walking all around the East End from my little nest in Regent Square, and I've been trying to trace the water-scape. If you walk into Frick Park and down past the ball-fields, you can turn left and head up Nine Mile Run. The trail takes you up to Braddock Avenue. You emerge from the forest at the bottom of the trolley-track-lined parking lot of the CLASS building. If you cross Braddock avenue on foot, and head down into Edgewood, you will find all sorts of pedestrian infrastructure, from stairs to secret pathways.

On one such walk, I noticed the steel plates which reinforce the concrete walls of this alleyway, and asked one of the neighbors, who told me that the stream was underneath it, and that they built the whole thing to be very strong. Later that day, I asked some Wilkinsburg municipal workers about the culvert/alleyway, and they explained that all the different storm-water pipes from the East End consolidate and merge into that culvert, which daylights down at the bottom of the CLASS building parking lot, and then goes on into Frick Park and out to the Mon.

[The "headwaters" of Nine Mile Run, as it emerges from its culvert. Apologies for the odd image-capture in the center of the photo- the tunnel emits a strange and slightly earthy-smelling mist which doesn't photograph well.]

All over the East End, streets and houses replaced streambeds, and surface water was channeled into man-made pipes and culverts. These lost streams can still be found as subtle signs in the land - access hatches for mucking out larger tunnels, oddly overbuilt roadways, obtuse property lines, and other hints of early 20th century infrastructure hiding under the modern street grid.

I'd like to engage in a big public ritual art activity before I move elsewhere from the East End (so some time in April or May 2019), which recognizes these lost streams, and helps us restore the land a little bit.

If you live in the Nine Mile Run Watershed- Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze, Regent Square, Greenfield, Wilkinsburg, Homewood East, East Hills, Edgewood, Swissvale, etc, and a combination parade and trash-pickup-day is of interest to you and your family, please reply. I'd like to get together a captain from each neighborhood, and propose to you-all a processional vision.

Mountains Beyond Mountains

WEEK 10 OF 2019 ||| NASHVILLE, TN & MENLO PARK, CA

[The view Southeast from Windy Hill, looking across the Coastal Range foothills, to the Pacific Ocean and the wide horizon.]

I grew up looking west at the Coastal Range, a series of mountains in California which run along the plate boundary, roughly parallel to the coast, all the way up into British Columbia. I could not, back then, imagine how tall they were.

They are the final geographical hurdle between the Bay Area and the coast. To go over them is to go over the last mountain range before endless water. I have lived elsewhere since then, and could always picture, in my mind, the mountains between myself and these ones, and then the coast beyond.

What's behind mountains? Mountains. More mountains. Mountains beyond mountains. And then my mountains. And then the sea.

The Coastal Range has amazing biodiversity - it's one of the few biomes where Redwoods and other sequoias grow (on this continent), and its slopes are home to unique flowers, newts, ferns, and grasses, as well as hundreds of introduced species.

California's environment has been exploited and disrupted by United States settlers since Pre-Victorian times. The history of the state is a history of water diversion, biological innovations, crop research, labor exploitation, and Victorian civic folly on a grand scale.

Eucalyptus trees, whose oil presents an enormous fire hazard, were introduced to be railroad-tie timber. After its wood was found to be unsuitable for rail (too twisted and too easily cracked), the tree grew freely in rights-of-way up and down the state, crowding out native trees with its soaring canopy, and covering the ground with its dry peeling bark and oily leaves.

Iceplants, a mat-like succulent species, were imported to stabilized the bases of man-made slopes, but have gone on to swamp and cover-over the coast's natural dunes and cliffsides.

That all said, the state has also seen wave after wave of eager and active environmentalists, who have systematically stabilized and preserved huge swathes of open land.

One of those people was Betsy Crowder. A longtime Bay Area resident, she spent the 70s as an environmental planner for the cities of Palo Alto and Portola Valley. In the 80s, she pushed for trail building and conservation efforts. In the 90s, she served the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, as their president and then as a board member.

She was killed by a drunk driver in 2000. She was 74, on her way back from a meeting of the Explorer's Club. That fatal crash occurred less than a mile from where her husband had been slain 30 years earlier, in an eerily similar drunk driver incident. That tragedy occured back in 1970, before Mrs. Crowder's career as a planner and manager of place.

I've hiked a lot of trails in the open spaces she stewarded. Rancho San Antonio. Crystal Springs Reservoir. Los Trancos. Coal Creek. Yesterday, I went to the mountains of my youth - Windy Hill Open Space Preserve, the very preserve that she lived by, and walked often.

I hiked the Betsy Crowder Trail, named in her honor, and then the Spring Ridge Trail, and I found myself, after an hour and a half, 1350 feet higher up, at the coastal ridgeline around 1900' above sea level. See the picture above for the view that welcomed me. I had summited Windy Hill. I could see the ocean. I could see where the mountains had no mountains beyond them.

What's behind mountains? Mountains. More mountains. Mountains beyond mountains. And then her mountains. And then the sea.

I grew up looking west at the Coastal Range. I could not, back then, imagine how tall they were.